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Living Room of Satoshi Packs It In

Living Room of Satoshi, an Australian company which enabled users to pay BPAY enabled bills using Bitcoin, has shut its doors due to concerns regarding the recent Goods and Services Tax ruling from the Australian Tax Office. The company had only recently won "best pitch" at the Future of Payments conference held in Sydney, Australia on the 19th of September.

Launched in May of this year, the service had a poor showing, processing just over AUD $250,000 in bill payments in 6 months, perhaps making the decision to close the service an easy one. While the final nail in the coffin was no doubt the GST guidance, by using the service provided by Living Room of Satoshi, customers introduced an intermediary to their bill payments and had the service shut abruptly, users of the service could have possibly ended up out of pocket, only to face paying the same bill twice.

Living Room of Satoshi also publishes data on what companies customers had paid, on what day and for what amount, leaving out only customer names. Plans for Satoshi Pay, which would have allowed businesses to include a Bitcoin QR code on invoices, also appear to have been scuttled.

As a result of Living Room of Satoshi closing, they have joined a number of other Australian Bitcoin businesses such as CoinSpot, Coinloft and BTC Markets to throw support behind Leo Treasure's petition to force the Australian government into becoming a Bitcoin friendly country.

Living Room of Satoshi was not the first company in Australia to provide customers with a way to use Bitcoin to pay BPAY enabled bills. BitBillPay.com.au, a service created by “Ryan” Zhou Tong, launched in January of this year although it too has closed.